The Twelve Caesars Read online

  To Claudius’ grandmother Livia Augustus wrote:

  The crux of the matter is (how best to put this?) whether he has full command of his faculties. If he is going to be physically or mentally handicapped, he (and therefore we) might easily become a laughing stock. There are going to be constant problems if we have to keep deciding if he can officiate here, or carry out duties there. What we need to decide is whether he is basically competent to perform in a public capacity.5

  Careful in deliberation, that propagandist emperor would answer his own question. In AD 12, acting jointly with Tiberius, Augustus decided to exclude Claudius categorically from Roman public life. Given the limited significance both men later accorded Claudius in their wills and Tiberius’ refusal of Claudius’ request for a magistracy in 14, it was evidently not a decision of which either repented. (Augustus’ prohibition extended to portraiture: in portrait schemes like the reliefs of the Ara Pacis Augustae, Claudius is a shadowy presence, sketched in whispers in the background, present only to avoid the conspicuousness of absence.) For longer than usual Claudius remained in his mother’s house, under the tutelage of a brutish guardian, a one-time mule-train commander, who abused him physically. If we accept Suetonius’ claim that the latter’s ‘express purpose’ was to ‘[punish] him with all possible severity for any cause whatever’, that programmatic bullying proceeded with Antonia’s consent. Such unmaternal harshness was a family-wide policy: ‘His grandmother [Livia] always treated him with the utmost contempt, very rarely speaking to him.’ She admonished him in short, loveless missives, or, more impersonally, through messengers. In a further act of indignity, Claudius’ coming-of-age ceremony, the public donning of the toga virilis, happened in clandestine fashion under cloak of darkness with minimal trappings. It is little wonder that the object of this hole-in-the-corner indifference should immerse himself so thoroughly in the alternative reality of historical research. On Claudius’ part, it was an acknowledgement of defeat and a retirement from the political mêlée which rejected him; both served him well. The illusion of incapacity insulated him against conspiracy. Following Germanicus’ death in 19, Claudius appears to have successfully avoided declaring any public allegiance during the lengthy and dangerous antagonism between Tiberius and his sister-in-law Agrippina: he is unlikely to have been canvassed for his opinion. Instead, that analysis which is central to the historian’s task replaced the first-hand experience of Roman politics his family took pains to deny him. It also generated a lifelong interest in the esoterica of Republican convention and the mores of previous generations of Romans. It is this period of research, part of the life he led after ‘[abandoning] all hope of advancement and [giving] himself up to idleness, living in obscurity now in his house and gardens in the suburbs, and sometimes at a villa in Campania’, which afterwards inspired those aspects of his principate which suggest a conscious archaism, like Augustus’ revival of lapsed cults and temple restorations. Claudius, for example, established a ‘Board of Soothsayers’. ‘The oldest Italian art,’ Tacitus reports him saying, ‘ought not to die out through neglect.’ He looked less kindly on the (non-Italian) Druids, whose ‘cruel and inhuman’ cult in Gaul, prohibited by Augustus to Roman citizens, he outlawed entirely. In the same period, restless in pursuit of diversion, he did not neglect the city’s drinking dens.

  In the event, Claudius did attain the consulship. The year was 37, the term from 1 July until 31 August; Claudius was forty-six. The new emperor Gaius exploited family loyalty to consolidate the legitimacy of his rule: Claudius was virtually a lone male relation. Two years later, Gaius forsook the illusion of a nephew’s affection, hurling Claudius into the Rhine in response to his message of congratulation on the former’s detection of Gaetulicus’ conspiracy. Smarting with bludgeoned amour propre, Claudius may have held fast to a portent of better things to come which Suetonius associates with his consulship: entering the Forum for the first time with the fasces of office in 37, he was singled out by a passing eagle which landed on his shoulder. Certainly there was little else in his life to encourage ambitious hopes. He cannot have conceived of the consulship (with a promise of a second term in four years’ time) as a springboard to ultimate power; he lacked prestige, authority, even – as Dio indicated – any experience of having been tested at all in any noteworthy position. It was, as he himself afterwards acknowledged, his trump card: only the appearance of dim-wittedness shielded Claudius throughout the purges of Tiberius, Sejanus and Gaius. There were those who did not believe this assumed stupidity. One wrote a book, The Elevation of Fools. Its thesis, Suetonius tells us, was ‘that no one feigned folly’.

  Alma-Tadema’s paintings hint only obliquely at the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of Gaius’ murder. Despite the anxious facial expression of the youthful Claudius of Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, the terrified grimace of the older Claudius in A Roman Emperor, AD 41, those motionless bodies and the bloody handprints of the same image, these paintings are too decorous to conjure effectively the chaos compounded of terror and exhilaration which overtook Rome. A panic-stricken populace converged on the Forum. In the Temple of Jupiter, senators gathered, their moment of decision – denied them for so long – come at last. Consuls transported the state treasury to the Capitol for safe-keeping. In an atmosphere dizzy with possibilities, senators ‘resolved on maintaining the public liberty’ by abolishing the principate; others, like Gaius’ brother-in-law Marcus Vinicius, husband of Julia Livilla whom Claudius would recall to Rome, proposed their own candidacy. Dio’s image of a senate at odds with itself suggests that few of its members had dared anticipate the eventuality in hand. ‘Many and diverse opinions were expressed; for some favoured a democracy, some a monarchy, and some were for choosing one man and some another.’6

  Uncertainly, Claudius made his way from the imperial box. It was the last day of the Palatine Games. ‘He withdrew to an apartment called the Hermaeum,’ Suetonius tells us. ‘A little later, in great terror at the news of the murder, he stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.’ What happened next has a quality as anecdotal as historical. In Suetonius’ version, after a day and a night in the Praetorian camp, Claudius found himself emperor by dint of the senate’s vacillations – ‘the tiresome bickering of those who held divergent views’ – and the calls of the entire city mob, whose chanting brooked no denial. In this version, the soldiers kill Gaius out of fury: their support for Claudius is a later decision, perhaps swayed by the popular mood, certainly encouraged by Claudius’ own promise to them of a reward of 15,000 sesterces each for their support (he afterwards made a smaller financial award every year on the anniversary of his accession).7 An alternative version by Josephus has the Praetorians choosing Claudius as Gaius’ successor in a hastily convened meeting following the murder on the Palatine. In this case, Claudius’ removal to the Praetorians’ camp is the means of guaranteeing his safety until the senate can be called upon to ratify the soldiers’ choice.8

  The net result for Claudius, whatever the degree of his involvement in the process, was the same. By what Suetonius calls a ‘remarkable freak of fortune’, the fifty-year-old Claudius, noted for his absent-mindedness and the political obscurity of his life to date, became Rome’s fifth Caesar through the armed support of the Praetorian Guard. The emperor’s crack fighting force had demonstrated incontrovertibly that they could make – as well as unmake – their leader. In both versions of the story, the senate’s endorsement of Claudius’ accession is laggardly. They hesitate... and falter in the face of bolder forces. It is a telling reservation and not tactful. It will linger in the memories of ruler and ruled. Time will reveal the exact nature of senatorial acquiescence and the feelings inspired by the Guards’ irresistible initiative. The senate’s acceptance of Claudius as princeps in 41, despite his undoubted status as minority candidate, bespeaks a truth Augustus had been at pains to conceal. Impossible any longer to perpetuate that hoary fiction of a restored Republic. There had
been those that winter afternoon who dreamed of restoring the Republic – Suetonius and Dio agree. Soldiers thought otherwise. And Claudius – to the manner born, heredity his sole distinction – did not resist the siren call of destiny.

  The concerns of Rome’s newest princeps were twofold: the Empire’s wellbeing and his own safety. The measures he took to ensure the latter encompassed symbolic acts intended to bolster the legitimacy of his claim to power as well as active steps to protect him from assassins and conspirators. Suetonius describes his timidity and suspicion as notorious:

  he never ventured to go to a banquet without being surrounded by guards with lances and having his soldiers wait upon him in place of the servants; and he never visited a man who was ill without having the patient’s room examined beforehand and his pillows and bed-clothing felt over and shaken out.

  Visitors to the palace, regardless of the nature of their business, were rigorously searched. Only towards the end of his reign did he permit a less intimate frisking of women and children. Conscious that he owed his throne to the simple fact of physical survival, ever mindful of the swingeing depredations to Augustus’ family tree of the previous two reigns, and apprised, from his reading of history, of the vulnerability of prominent lives, Claudius’ anxiety in the face of possible attack was extreme. Perhaps the nature of his nervous condition exacerbated his response. After an equestrian was discovered in the Temple of Mars armed with a hunting knife while Claudius sacrificed, he tearfully begged the senate’s protection, proclaiming with purple pathos that there was no safety for him anywhere. We need not doubt Claudius’ sincerity – nor in several cases the sincere intent of the instances of opposition which punctuate his rule from the outset: the suspected conspiracy of Asinius Gallus and Statilius Corvinus, confirmed by Suetonius and Dio; the unnamed equestrian who lay in wait for Claudius outside the theatre brandishing a sword-stick; the man who broke into the palace at night and, dagger in hand, found his way to Claudius’ bedchamber.

  Of greater significance both to Claudius’ future outlook and, given the nature of his response, to attitudes to his principate among senatorial circles was the attempted uprising in 42 of Lucius Arruntius Camillus Scribonianus, governor of Dalmatia, which Suetonius described as a rebellion amounting to civil war. This five-day conspiracy of senators who the sources claim as former potential successors to Gaius, chief among them Scribonianus himself and Annius Vinicianus, collapsed, Dio asserts, because the Dalmatian legions, ‘when Scribonianus held out to them the hope of seeing the Republic restored and promised to give back to them their ancient freedom, suspected that they should have trouble and strife once more, and would therefore no longer listen to him.’9 Claudius duly rewarded the legions with the name ‘Claudian, Loyal and Patriotic’ and further gifts of money,10 sagaciously blind to the element of pragmatism that had governed their actions and the decisive role of ominous weather conditions. So far, so good. But in his determination to stamp out lingering embers of Scribonianus’ revolt, he embarked on something like a witch-hunt, which offered informers a bonanza and resulted in large numbers of executions, women as well as men in Dio’s account. The repressiveness of Claudius’ reprisals disconcerted those concerned most nearly, namely Roman senators and their families, precisely that group which for the past year had demonstrated reservations about Claudian rule. In a response which extended to denying the condemned even ordinary funeral rites, Claudius could no longer lay claim to moderation: although she was ultimately pardoned, a wife called Cloatilla found herself on trial for burying her husband.11 It was vindictive and petty-minded, closer to Gaius’ model of leadership than Augustus’, and gave rise to rumours of a ‘cruel and bloodthirsty disposition’ which revelled, among other diversions, in scenes of torture and execution.

  Unsuccessful it may have been, but Claudius was unsettled by Scribonianus’ conspiracy. It indicated the extent of personal dissatisfaction with his rule, and the failure of his policy, in the face of senatorial intransigence, of legitimizing his claim to power by emphasizing family connections. The wholly Claudian Claudius had set in motion the process of awarding divine honours to his grandmother Livia, wife of the adopted Julian Augustus, and in addition to games given in memory of his father Drusus, had similarly honoured his mother Antonia, herself Augustus’ niece. Early coin issues reiterated this litany of distinguished and useful descent, commemorating Drusus, Antonia and the Divine Augustus. It was unavoidable, given the nature of Claudius’ claim to the throne. It was evidently not enough.

  But Claudius was not insensitive to the feelings of the senate. An assiduous (even officious) jurist, when it suited him he cultivated an illusion of something approaching stakeholder government. He requested the senate to voice independent judgements, this insistence on the appearance of free-thinking his own version of Augustus’ ‘collaboration’ of princeps and magistrates. Punctiliousness in the matter of traditional courtesies created that ersatz equality by which he meant to woo senators, etiquette in the service of deception. He avoided the bulldozer approach of his nephew Gaius: his intention was never Eastern-style monarchy. To this end he overruled the senate’s proposed awards following the birth of his only son three weeks after his accession; Claudius’ third wife, Valeria Messalina, was not created Augusta nor did the couple’s son, afterwards called Britannicus, receive the honorific ‘Augustus’. Such resilience in the face of apparent senatorial sycophancy (whatever the truth of that body’s feelings) countered claims of tyranny. It also attempted to reassure Romans that the role of the emperor’s wife was appropriately circumscribed. This too was a deceit.

  Claudius had had two previous wives before his marriage to Valeria Messalina (he had also been engaged on a further two occasions: his second would-be bride died on their wedding day). His divorce of his first wife Plautia Urgulanilla included charges of adultery and sensational, if unconfirmed, rumours of murder: not of Claudius but of Plautia’s sister-in-law. The circumstances of that death – a fatal fall from a window – were sufficiently provocative to necessitate the involvement of the emperor Tiberius. Claudius’ second wife, Aelia Paetina, was a connection of Sejanus. Their marriage was of relatively short duration, its purpose presumably negated by Sejanus’ fall. By early 39 at the latest, Claudius had married the youthful Messalina, who was less than half his age. As a great-granddaughter of Augustus’ sister Octavia through both her father’s and her mother’s families, she would afterwards reinforce those claims to power made by Claudius on the grounds of Augustan pedigree. The couple’s marriage coincided with Claudius’ emergence under Gaius to a position of greater prominence.

  Distinction takes many forms. Messalina could undoubtedly lay claim to high birth. It would not prove her chief attribute. Amoral, rapacious, manipulative, deceitful, interfering, fecund and above all spectacularly oversexed, she emerges from the sources as a byword for feminine transgression. We assume that she was beautiful, though thanks to the damnatio memoriae which followed her death, no certain contemporary images of her survive: certainly she exercised sexual power bordering on bewitchment over the susceptible Claudius. (Perhaps she was a cause of that insomnia which led him to fall asleep during his working day, often when he was hearing cases in court.) In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder records a competition instigated by Messalina with ‘one of the most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute’ to see who could take the largest number of sexual partners in a single session. Predictably – else the story should hardly have survived – Messalina won with a tally of twenty-five.12 In a well-known passage of character assassination, Juvenal related nocturnal sorties made by Claudius’ wife to a Roman brothel. There, while the princeps slept, she worked in a blonde wig, with gilded nipples, under the trade name ‘She-Wolf’. All the sources agree that Messalina suffered from an addiction. Juvenal describes her unrosily after such a session as ‘still burning with her clitoris inflamed and stiff... exhausted by the men but not yet satisfied... a disgusting creature�
��.13 Such images would undoubtedly have shocked the empress’s contemporaries: so marked a predisposition, were it known, could hardly have earned her the award of the title Augusta from the senate, however debased.

  At the outset of Claudius’ reign, Messalina received public honours, including a grant of statues and a place alongside the Vestal Virgins at the theatre. When Claudius celebrated the triumph of Britain in 44, she took a prominent place in the procession in a special carriage behind him. It might have continued thus, but Messalina’s cravings apparently drove her to actions which, impacting on upper-class life in the capital, merged distinctions between her public and private lives, politicizing her libido in a way which could only end badly. At this point she becomes the bejewelled nude of a Gustave Moreau watercolour, skin pale as whey, a diadem in her hair, so dizzy with her own erotic delusions that she scarcely notices the ardent youth whose neck she cradles; blind to the Rome beyond palace windows, the claims of rank, motherhood or Claudius’ happiness. Examples like this of overspill into the public arena of the peccadilloes of his wives would become one of the principal criticisms of Claudius’ reign. In Messalina’s case, it offended another precept of Augustus’ revolution: the promotion of imperial women as exemplars of outstanding moral virtue, the role Livia, Octavia and Antonia had embraced.

  At first Messalina adhered to Augustan convention. But she busied herself in pointless conspiracies. Her motives may be lost for ever. She enlisted in her cause Claudius’ powerful freedmen: Pallas (his treasurer), Narcissus (his secretary) and that opportunistic relic of the previous regime, Kallistos. Marcus Vinicius, brother of the conspirator Vinicianus, was apparently poisoned for resisting Messalina’s advances, a story which includes too many unprovables for comfort. Earlier Messalina’s jealousy probably lay behind the second banishment of Vinicius’ wife, Julia Livilla: on this occasion Gaius’ sister starved to death. The Gaulish consul Valerius Asiaticus died so that Messalina could gratify through theft her craving for gardens in Rome which Tacitus reports him as ‘beautifying with exceptional lavishness’.14 Asiaticus’ trial behind closed doors, with every appearance of a stitch-up, earned senatorial antipathy for both Messalina and Claudius; his phlegmatism in the face of imperial caprice gave the regime’s opponents a valuable martyr.15 By contrast there may have been dynastic reasons for getting rid of Appius Silanus, a connection of the Claudii, at the beginning of the reign. ‘Messalina and Narcissus put their heads together to destroy him,’ Suetonius records. They invented dreams in which both saw Appius kill Claudius. It was enough to ensure his hasty execution. Claudius took naïvety to extremes in reporting the affair to the senate and importuning thanks for his freedman. Such proofs of uxoriousness did not enhance senators’ views of the emperor’s capabilities nor of the good practice of his government. Over time they also eroded Messalina’s popularity to an extent which boded ill for her son Britannicus. For as there existed within the imperial family men and women equally closely related to Augustus as Claudius and Messalina – and therefore equally qualified to rule – there existed in the next generation a young man whose claim to the principate came close to matching Britannicus’. His name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and he was the son of Agrippina the Younger, who so far, unlike her less fortunate sister Julia Livilla, had resisted Messalina’s fury. At the Secular Games held by Claudius in 47, the year Agrippina became a widow for the second time, Domitius received applause more lusty than that accorded to Britannicus, his junior by five years. It was a sign of things to come.